Library of Small Catastrophes

Alison C. Rollins’s 2019 debut collection reads like a cabinet of wonders—a book that feels, page by page, like stepping into a reading room of the mind. Drawing from Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with libraries, Rollins treats the archive not as a neutral repository but as a living, volatile terrain where memory, history, belief, and the body collide.

As a library worker in my final semester of my Master’s of Library and Information Sciences program, I was especially struck by Rollins’s interrogation of classification and order. In one poem, she addresses the Dewey Decimal System directly, asking, “How will I organize all the bodies?” Cataloging becomes an ethical problem rather than a technical one, exposing the limits of systems built on bias, designed to return things “back to where they belong.” The realities of the human condition, of grief, faith, desire, race, and violence, refuse containment, insisting instead on mess, overlap, and contradiction.

Throughout the collection, Rollins represents art as an act of endurance—something made in the midst of fear, anger, and loss. Love becomes a chosen vulnerability; memory a force with its own gravity. The poems move between personal and collective catastrophe, reminding us that “memory is an art form / forgetting is a science / poems are the living dead.” Poetry, in all its haunting, ethereal glory, resides precisely in this precarious space between preservation and disappearance.

Library of Small Catastrophes ultimately asks what it means to move into the future while carrying the weight of the past—and still choose to make art. It is fitting that, like the best libraries, this collection does not offer easy answers, but instead teaches us how to hold complexity and contradiction, how to question the systems that shape our world, and, perhaps most importantly, how to read with care.

“A blind poet takes up the pen 
in the same way the sun eats fire. Self-destruction a form 
of craft, an illustration of what a stanza can withstand. 
All religion is art. Art is pain suffered and outlived.”